Drive for a living.

Watership Down meets Mad Max meets Alien

Revisado: 04-26-24

I liked this more than I expected.

The characters are a different species, but are relatable. They may as well be humans because their behavior is well within the human range. They are stock character types, like the leader, the visionary, the smart kid, the outsider, but that's fine. The band of heroes goes on a quest and then there is a showdown. Along the way, they learn how to fight the big threat but it is never without cost. Usually, in stories like this the heroes find a silver bullet that wins the battle easily. That doesn't happen in this book. The terror and above all the chaos of combat is portrayed here as well as I've ever read it. Even when there is a good plan, things go horribly wrong and people die. The nature of the characters and their experiences means that it takes time for them to learn new things, and they don't magically figure out how to fight in a new way overnight. As a result, many die. I liked that a lot. Battle is chaos, and deadly.

The characters have a particular way of speaking that reminded me of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome for some reason. It didn't annoy me, and it made sense once I got used to it. I don't know if it's German grammar or something the author made up. Also, the character names are never explained. I assumed that they are ancestral from the original dogs. Some are corrupted,("Oscar-so-Wild") which is a nice touch.

I liked the dog storyteller and his tales, which reminded me of Dandelion from Watership Down telling the mythology of the rabbits. It was a good way to explain the backstory of the setting. It's not difficult to understand what happened in the past, but it doesn't tell everything.

Things I didn't like:
The survival of certain artifacts from centuries before was difficult to believe. I did not understand why they would not have been used up long ago in internecine fighting. There is a lack of an industrial base to support the technology that the characters use.

The writing is effective and kept my attention. Good narration as well, although I still don't know what the dogs are called. "Orcs?" Oryxs? Can't tell.

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No, it's not good, stop lying

Revisado: 10-20-22

I own 18 other books by Dan Abnett. I'm a fan. He can change writing styles to tell different kinds of stories. Eisenhorn is different than Gaunt is different than Brothers of the Snake.

That's not what is happening in this book. The peculiarly bad writing infesting this work isn't a style choice. The writing is so bad that I wonder if this book was ghost written by someone paid by the word to fulfill a contractual obligation.

How bad is it? At one point the protagonist is attacked by a servitor who attempts to stick her with a syringe.

As a reader, you can figure out that the bad guys probably want to drug and capture her.

But noooooo... The protagonist explains to us, in the middle of a fight scene, that the syringe must have some drug in it and that means they must want to capture her. This takes a full minute of audio.

This book is Nurgle Rot. It's the sort of rot that established authors put out because their fans will buy it no matter how bad it is. It's the sort of rot that convinced me to write my own SF novels, because if this can sell, why not get published myself? How hard can it be? While I can't say I'm a better writer than Dan Abnett, I am comfortable saying that I wrote and published better books than this one.

My disappointment is total. Abnett can write well, but there is no evidence of any talent in this book.

If you want more of the vivid and character-driven stories in the Eisenhorn or Ravenor series, sorry, this isn't it. Don't waste your credits on this.

As for the narrator, not everyone can be Toby Longworth. The fact they didn't spring to pay him for his time should have been a clue that this series isn't meant to be taken seriously. The bad writing and merely competent narration put me to sleep. When I woke up, I got a refund.

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A digest of the intellectual conservitive movement

Revisado: 03-12-13

Any additional comments?

I was struck by how little of this book was not familiar. I'm 38 years old, and I read a lot. The fact that I've heard almost all the arguments contained in this book, even though it's now 27 years since it was written, tells me that it has been very influential. Everything in it has been amplified by repetition.

So, it was not a book that "made me think," because I've heard it all before- from Bloom's description of conviction-less Gen X students to the influence of the Frankfurt School on American intellectuals. If you've glanced at National Review sometime in the last two decades you've seen it all.

That's not a hit on Bloom, because he's the original compiler. These ideas were all floating around, but he put them all in one place.

Honestly, the best part for me was early on. There's a good discussion of rock music, which will seem quaint to readers who've lived their entire lives in the era since the 1950s. Bloom is still right- the influence of music on the lives of the young is underrated. Much attention remains focused on other external influences such as video games or movies when it is music that matters. I think this part of the book has the deepest bite. People seem very defensive about their music, and music has an undue influence on their thinking. My coworkers spend hundreds of dollars on car stereos. I buy new tires instead. I get Bloom's point.

Overall, if you want to understand the intellectual side of the conservative movement this is a very good place to start. If you have a background in the liberal arts, especially in 19th and 20th century philosophy, that will help a lot. Otherwise it can be very hard going.

This isn't an anti-liberal screed so much as a Platonic defense of absolute truth, and the pursuit of the good. The extent to which this criticism falls on liberals is a result of their own abdication of the responsibility that they once took seriously- to educate the young in the service of building a better society. They don't even know what that is anymore, to their cost. Creating a blasted nihilistic world of the mind for our best and brightest is not a plan designed to produce an elite with the common good foremost in their minds.

The education of our elite is the subject of this book. Looking around, it's obvious that whatever education our current elite received it was sorely lacking in moral direction. If that's a conservative message, what happened to the liberals?

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A return to what's good about the series

Revisado: 01-09-13

Any additional comments?

I like this series enough to keep reading it, but it's not the best thing I've ever read. It's strongest when it focuses on naval operations and the particularities of the far future setting. I enjoy the "Napoleonic Wars In Space," schtick. The political infighting within all the big nations is completely believable. The way the space technology works is extremely detailed, which is fine, and the way the setting re-creates an interesting historical period in the far future is a treat.

This book was a partial return to what made the first book successful. Honor Harrington does "Navy Stuff,"- she commands a starship, fights space pirates, makes life or death decisions, and suffers the consequences. The subplots are all set up well and all pay off. I particularly enjoyed the plight of the People's Navy officers who were too decent for their own good. The theme that civilized states, even when they fight one another, are all superior to barbarians resonates with me.

The series is weakest when it wallows in the protagonist's emotional life (for someone who has killed thousands of people in space battles she sure has a lot of angst about relatively minor problems), with the absolute low point in every book being when the space cats appear. Cats don't belong on naval vessels, ever, and should be thrown over the side, or out the airlock, whenever an infestation appears. These animals gain more intelligence, telepathic powers, and page space in each successive book of the series and are obviously not ever going to be killed, by anything, ever, despite how ridiculous they are. To me, they are the Jar-Jar Binks of the whole fictional universe. Maybe David Weber likes cats?

When Honor Harrington becomes an action hero, able to defeat anyone at their own game, I roll my eyes. This is the stuff of B-grade action movies. Since the tone of these books is light, perhaps I shouldn't complain about it. "Honor Among Enemies," only has one scene like this, but it's set up before hand (unfortunately that setup is a big clunker, having to do with a madman, a nuclear trigger, and an over-involved negotiation that I mostly skipped through.) The resolution was a surprise, using a "Chekov's Gun" that I'd mostly forgotten about.

The "Navy Stuff," is very well done. I served four years in the the US Navy, and the books have a good grasp of what it's like to be in the service. The "lower decks" subplot with Petty Officer Wunderman is sadly a very common experience. My understanding is that David Weber is a naval historian, and it shows.

All in all, this is a much better book than the previous entry of the series, which spent far too little time in space.

The narration is good. I don't know why so many people are annoyed by it, but with the main character being female dictates that a female narrator should be reading the book. The narrator does a much better job with the male voices than almost any male reader would do with female voices, and since Honor Harrington is doing most of the talking it makes complete sense. The one character that, to me, sounded silly died in book four. I can always tell the characters apart, and the foreign accents make sense given that this is the "Napoleonic Wars In Space."

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